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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

41–50 of 565 posts

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#41

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

That's the completely opposite of what people should do. The laborious task of programing logical work flows is the only reason AI is useful for me.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#42

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

Basically, folks nowadays think that this article[1] was aspirational rather than a cautionary tale.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-No-Quack

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#43

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

My management is pushing for us to come up with ideas on where we can use LLMs in our product. The whole team has been very resistant for this exact reason. Anything we can think of will only make things worse, and we’ve already been told anything above a 1-2% failure rate is unacceptable. If anything we need more structure and standards to hit that, not less.

I believe that llm’s can be used to re-imagine experiences but it’s definitely not the way people think. The constraint is imagination and thinking about complex trade offs more than anything else. Which is the essence of innovation.

The agent paradigm will eventually give way to experiences that are a hybrid of deterministic and non deterministic and you won’t even know the llm was involved or visible.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#44
post #32

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

Might be because there are less Swift projects to train with. But I've seen Claude write crazy code in Python and JavaScript, too

I do not know about crazy, but certainly sub-optimal. For example a loop over DB query results instead of modifying the code to work with a single query.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#45
I honestly just use it as a search engine to get around SEO garbage and ads.

My wife uses it for a (non-computer related) business though and it's great for all sorts of normally tedious marketing/social media type jobs though. Stuff that doesn't really require accuracy just needs text on pictures that looks good quickly.

I think everyone just has FOMO and doesn't want to lose to competitors. Eventually it'll die down.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#46

Reminds me of this article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... Software engineers are definitely in a bit of a bubble here. Are we just early adopters who see the value sooner, or does it uniquely benefit software engineering, or do we just like cool automation and we're deluding ourselves that this adds value beyond the cost?

Software has huge and detailed code repositories ripe for training use. There's just enough inference in current models to remix that code in useful ways for the most popular languages.

The less popular a language, the more models struggle.

Writing, UI, and presentations have similar knowledge bases.

Outside of those, quality becomes much more hit and miss. If you ask for a recipe you may get something good, or you may get something completely inedible and random.

"Domain specific knowledge" really means "strong foundations and relevant abstractions" and LLMs just don't do that reliably.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#47

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

In my experience the language has become irrelevant for me, I created a system like mix of revenuecat and firebase and I’m not even sure what language which part is. It has client side libraries that are swift and kotlin, the Identity management is Swift but the iAP/Subscription tracking is go IIRC. It’s all integrated somehow and works very well.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#48

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

When was the last time you used Google? The first entry (and a few after that) is always spam.

Anyone who does a search and accepts the first answer just doesn't care much or is incompetent. Anyone with any critical thinking whatsoever does way more than that if they want a correct answer.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#49

Reminds me of this article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... Software engineers are definitely in a bit of a bubble here. Are we just early adopters who see the value sooner, or does it uniquely benefit software engineering, or do we just like cool automation and we're deluding ourselves that this adds value beyond the cost?

Software engineers aren't even all using AI, contrary to frequent claims here that they are. There are very many who have tried it, found it didn't add value to their work, and aren't using it unless FOMO-driven managers force them to.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#50
post #26

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

This would be expected. The corner cases people faced with PHP throughout the decades have been well documented on the internet for eons. Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense. It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage out…

Also, I suspect most "production" Swift –the type of stuff written by seasoned experts– (I just had to add em-dashes ;) is behind closed-source walls.
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